An End Once and for All
by LovEinLimBo
Summary: Shepard doesn't get an end of his own; legends never do. (John Shepard/Kaidan Alenko)


**Pairing:** John Shepard/ Kaidan Alenko (unconsummated)

**Summary:** Shepard doesn't get an end of his own; legends never do.

**Notes**: Shepard had rejected Kaidan because heroes are not meant to have anything for themselves. Everything and everybody else come first, and what 'he' wants does not matter. He's more an icon than an actual man, and symbols do not need love to get the job done. And Shepard does get the job done, one way or another. It just might have not been easy sometimes.

**An End Once and for All**

And then there comes a time when no matter how far you reach out, your hand keeps slipping through, never making contact with anything solid to grasp, to hold onto, to pull yourself out of this black hole before it swallows you whole. When your biotic charge fails- pathetic sparks of silvery blue that whimper like a dying varren until they turn into air dust- for there is no mass effect field around you anymore to manipulate. Just emptiness, dark, everlasting and self-consuming. It claws its way into your chest, sips swiftly through your hardest armor and tears your cybernetic tissues apart. And it happens so fast that even your armor readings fail to warn you about the malfunction in time. You're dead before you know it, and you can only hope that this time you just stay dead. No Lazarus project, no Cerberus bullshit, no strings attached. Just floating in space for as long as time goes on, and if he were to be pulled down by gravity, enter the atmosphere and get blown up, let his pieces scatter all over the planet, like seeds of the most hideous flower that never withers, or like golden flecks of a genophage cure raining over barren lands, impregnating them with hope as they disappear into the soil and rocks and water, never to resurface, never to come back again.

Shepard never thought he would ever experience this feeling, never thought this feeling even existed to be experienced, but he missed being dead. He didn't get enough time to adjust after he'd returned from the land of the dead, where he had been led all his life to believe was a land of no return; the fight with the Collectors had kept his mind preoccupied and between salvaging past relationships, recruiting new squad mates and doing various missions to ensure their loyalty, he could hardly find some alone time with his thoughts. And it was a good thing, at the time. It helped him focus on what had to be done, keep himself in the vision, and push through until he got to the last square. But then came his time under Alliance surveillance. Being alone with thoughts that kept pushing against the barriers he had worked so hard to set up, it had been exhausting. And once his barriers were down, it would only take one shot to blow him up.

He endured, of course. That was what he did best. He had survived far more terrible traumas than this. The memory of Mindoir was still fresh in his mind, as if it hadn't been 20 something years ago, as if his life hadn't been altered drastically after that incident, as if he hadn't died. But he had learned to put his problems at the furthest recesses of his mind; to forget about his own pains because the mission always came first. It was the first thing they taught you in a regular N1 program. When fatally injured but not in a position to retreat or get healed, try to separate your mind from your pain, focus solely on the mission, and get the job done before you bleed to death. They'll give you an award afterward if you're lucky, or a proper funeral if you're not. What matters is that pain is not just weakness; it's an adversary; kill it before it kills you. If you succumb to it, then you'll become expendable. And Shepard simply could not be expendable.

The galaxy didn't want his pain or anything else that made him human; they wanted a hero, godlike, invincible and bulletproof. He understood, of course. Every once in a while, a hero needed to rise among devastated, yet hopeful people, to keep them together, to bear their burden so that life could go on, like a river that meandered its way under a bulky bridge. Shepard never would have thought he'd be that hero, but here he was, whether he liked or not, because someone else might have gotten it wrong. _You never asked for it, but if you refuse, people will die_. Someone else might have not been enough, and Shepard had no illusion about his own capabilities. A hero had to be a survival above everything else, because a hero dying at the wrong time wasn't even worth a plaque on a memorial wall, a reminiscent of how bad things had gone and how worse they were going to get. No one wanted a dead hero right now, and Shepard knew all too well that if it hadn't been for Cerberus bringing him back, everything he had done so far would have been swept under the carpet, forgotten as if he had never existed, and all his efforts and sacrifices would have meant nothing. And if he were to die before completing his mission now...

It wasn't that he was invincible. Far from it; he always bore the brunt of every mission; he was the first to run into a room, the one constantly out of cover, running from one side of the battlefield to another, making sure everybody else was alright, and still in the heat of it all at the end of the mission, firing shot after shot as he bought some time for his squad mates to make it to the shuttle. He was Dr. Chakwas' most frequented patient, with scars that never truly got enough time to heal. No, it wasn't that he was invincible; it was just that he would die only when his death would make the greatest difference, when it would matter the most, and in this case, only when he had made sure the Reapers were no longer a threat to the galaxy. Only then would he allow himself the luxury of death, only then would he have lived up to his title, and only then would all the sacrifices have been worthwhile.

Being a hero made sure you had many people who knew you, who loved you, worshipped you, would even die for you, if you let it happen. It also meant that you had to confine your own wishes and dreams to a solitary cell so that you could allow for others' wishes and dreams to have a chance to get fulfilled. It was a paradoxical life Shepard was living, full and empty at the same time; but not for long, though. He could feel it; the life slipping away from him, getting further away with every step that he took forward and away from it. Maybe it wasn't that his life was slipping away from him, but rather _he_ was walking away from it. He was reaching out into the emptiness not for his life, but for that one dream that never actually got to become a part of his life.

_"Ever had that one thing you'd always wanted to do before you died, Shepard?"_

_"No, too busy trying to live. What about you, Garrus?"_

It had always been too easy to ignore that one thing that mattered to him the most, to squash the urgency of having it fulfilled under everything the galaxy kept throwing at him to fix; to look at it but not to see it; to touch it but not to feel it; to have it but not to own it. Shepard had always been too busy trying to live to remember what it was he had always wanted before he died; but now that he was marching towards his death, with the whole galaxy as nothing but a mere blob of white noise at the back of his mind, he remembered, and it throbbed inside his chest with more intensity than his bullet wounds, and splashed his conscious with more blood than what he had already lost. If he could have had just this one moment, just a little something of his own, for himself, a decision that wouldn't have affected the whole galaxy, a little touch that could have burned only through his own armor and no one else's, a little smile that could have lightened up his own world only and nowhere else. Would it have been too much to ask for words that were meant only for him to hear, a body only for him to hold? Would it have been too much to want something, _someone_, for himself, would that be too selfish, un-heroic, undeserved? Would it have been too much to ask to be normal, a mere mortal human with simple desires, when the whole galaxy wanted to see him as anything but?

But right now no one was watching him; no one was smelling the metallic odor of his blood, no one was witnessing his broken body limping forward, sweat and blood and burned skin and thermal clips, a hole in his side wider than his hand could ever cover up, and his shield depleted and his armor utterly useless now. What were a man to do at the time of his death but to remember? The things he'd done, but mostly those he hadn't and would never do. A life of great deeds, heroic deeds, but also of regrets and failures, too. A life of holes that were filled with mismatched moments, and then there were holes that had never been filled, gnawing like yellowed, infectious wounds. Would death bring him closure when death was just a continuation of his life without him? But was he even looking for a closure of his own when he had never asked or strove for anything for himself? This was the end once and for all, but it wasn't _his_ end. It was the end of the cycle for the Reapers; it was the end of war and death and suffering for the galaxy. His end was not in his death or even in the memories he would leave behind. He just didn't have one; legends never did.

But these weren't his dying thoughts. He had still one thing left to do and he needed something, a desire, a dream, to keep his hand steady on the gun and his legs on the ground. He had already made up his mind the moment the Child told him how to destroy the Reapers. Control or synthesis were not an option. Now was not the time for split second decisions, because they usually tended to end badly. Destroying the Reapers was what he had wanted to do from the start and he would do it, despite the consequences, the sacrifices. Some were necessary, like his life; some were unavoidable, like EDI's and the geth's. Somehow the thought of his own death made it easier to destroy all synthetics, and he knew that someday they would be recreated, for better or worse. But _he_ would die now, never to be created again, blood dripping on the floor to the rhythm of his thumping heart as he made his way toward the tube. With the Reapers gone, the galaxy would have no more use for him, and he'd welcome death like his much overdue sanity check. Shot after shot was emptied into the tube and as the explosion engulfed his body with a blanket of fire, Shepard's head was filled with one single image of his dream that he never allowed to come true: to have someone to turn to when things looked grim, someone to live for, maybe love...someone to die for.

_"Someone?"_

You, Kaidan.

You.


End file.
